Timico chief annoyed with BT Openreach service

The co-founder of business internet service provider Timico has criticised BT for missing too many appointments with its customers and mishandling his fault report.

Posting on his personal blog, Trefor Davies said his Openreach VDSL modem, which is required for his fibre broadband service to work, had broken and needed to be replaced. He is unhappy that despite his family having to cancel appointments in order to be available, the BT engineer called out to fix the problem did not arrive at the specified time.

The visit was then rescheduled, only for the engineer to fail to attend once again. A third appointment has now been arranged.

Earlier this month, Mr Davies claimed he was unhappy with a reduction in his broadband speed caused by damage to BT's copper cabling. Despite being annoyed with BT's service, Mr Davies did stress the positive contribution of an Opeanreach engineer who eventually solved the problem.

However, in light of recent events, he claimed that BT now needs to "up its game". He said that his own experience is not an isolated event and it is a common occurrence for engineers to miss their scheduled visits.

Mr Davies has spoken to the Network Operations Centre, who said there have been instances where BT engineers have failed to attend three of four consecutive scheduled meetings and missed appointments "happen every day".

He pointed out that he did not blame the engineers who "are under a lot of pressure to maintain a network that is very old and starting to fall apart".

However, Mr Davies is also disappointed with the service provided by BT's internal support staff, who failed to correctly read information concerning the problems with his modem. This led to an unnecessary attempt to reset the system, which had already failed.

The Timico leader concluded by saying he is now aware of how frustrating incidents such as this can be from an end customer’s perspective and it "just isn’t good enough".